She went happily, flushed, shuffling through the woods and plucking the shy wildflowers that sat upon the sun-patched earth and half shrouded under old leaves glared back a small violence of color upon the bland March skies. With her bouquet clutched in both hands before her she stepped finally into the clearing, a swatch of grass, sunlight, birdcalls, crossing with quiet and guileless rectitude to stand before a patch of black and cloven earth.
Some willingness to disbelief must have made her see and reflect. Certainly it could have held a grown man, this piece of ground gutted and strewn with mulch, slugwhite roots upturned to the disastrous light. She bent slowly and with pain and laid the flowers down. She knelt so for some time, and then she leaned forward and placed one palm on the cool earth. And then she began to scoop away the dirt with her hands.
She had not dug but a few inches before she came upon packed clay, unsevered roots. She chose another spot and soon uncovered a bedded rock which bared to the oblique lightfall of the sun’s retrograde lay scored with powdery axemarks.
His long shadow overrode her but she did not see it. She stood and turned and found herself against his chest. She screamed and fell back, stumbled to the ground crushing the flowers, the blood starting again, warm on her leg. But he was the one: kneeling in the dark earth with his writhen face howling at her, saying Now you done it. Now you really went and done it. And her own face still bland and impervious in such wonder he mistook for accusation, silent and inarguable female invective, until he rose and fled, bearing his clenched hands above him threatful, supplicant, to the mute and windy heavens.
THEY ENTERED the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them paying no heed, seeming blind with purpose, passing through an ether of smartweed and stale ammonia steaming from the sunbleared chickenrun and on through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook, emerging in an explosion of guineafowl and one screaming sow, unaltered in gait demeanor or speed, parodic figures transposed live and intact and violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields, advancing against the twilight, the droning bees and windtilted clover.
THE STORM had abated but rain still fell. He sat watching it with his chin propped on the soured and thinworn knees of his overalls, crouched on his narrow strip of dead earth, the fine clay dust musty and airless even above the rank breath of the wet spring woods. Night came and he slept. When he woke again it was to such darkness he did not trust his balance. He was very cold. He curled himself up on the ground and listened to the rain drifting in a rapid patter with the wind across the forest. When morning came he was sitting again with his knees tucked up, waiting, and with the first smoky portent of light he rose and set forth from the shelter of the cliff and through the steaming woods to the road, now a flume of ashcolored loam through which he struggled with weighted shoes, his hands pocketed and head cupped between his shoulderblades.
He reached the town before noon, mud slathered to his knees, wading through a thick mire in which the tracks of wagons crossed everywhere with channels of milky gray water, entering the square among the midday traffic, a wagon passing him in four pinwheels of flickering mud. He watched it pull up before a store, the horse coming to rest in an ooze that reached its fetlocks and the high wheels of the wagon sucking halfway to their hubs. He reached the store as the driver was turning and getting down. Howdy, he said.
How do, said the driver, pulling a sack from the wagon bed. A mite boggy, ain’t she?
Yes tis, he said. You need any help?
Thank ye, said the man. I can get it all right.
He levered the sack onto his shoulder, nodded to Holme standing there holding the door, and went in, disappearing to the rear of the building. Holme approached the counter, unknotting the kerchief and removing two coins.
Yes, the clerk said, looking up out of the shabby and ludicrous propriety of his celluloid collar and winecolored cravat, his slight figure lost in a huge green coat coarse-woven and yieldless as iron.
Dime’s worth of cheese and crackers, Holme said.
A dime’s worth each?
No, both.
A nickel’s worth each then, the clerk said.
Holme was looking about him at the varieties of merchandise. He looked at the clerk. What? he said.
I said a nickel’s worth each.
That’d be a sight of crackers wouldn’t it?
I don’t know.
Holme seemed to be thinking about something else. After a minute he drummed his knuckles on the counter and looked up. You ever eat cheese and crackers? he said.